60GHz wireless specialist, Blu Wireless has closed a $3.1 million (£2m) funding round. This will allow the company to drive further growth, doubling in size to 30 staff, and complete the development of its HYDRA baseband IP offering for 802.11ad next generation WiFi (WiGig CERTIFIED) and 4G mobile network backhaul applications.

The funding round was led by Qi3 Accelerator, who represented a syndicate of over $1.5m (£1m) of London Business Angels private investors, including Wren Capital. A further $0.9 million (£0.6m) was invested by the Angel Co-Fund, several additional investors made up the remainder.

Blu Wireless’s baseband technology uses a flexible parallel processing architecture to efficiently support the complex modulation schemes required for emerging multi-gigabit wireless communication standards. The IP is currently optimised for chipsets used in both advanced WiFi and 4G small cell deployments, and can be simply scaled to support the anticipated future standards as they move to 20Gbps and beyond.